"The music touring business is showing record profits. Only the intermediaries, who package and yet neither sing nor play, have suffered from the overthrow."

Not so. Here in Nashville a lot of songwriters and session musicians are hurting as well--and since songwriting and session work underwrites the real creative community here, it threatens its future. As usual, you guys think the only model for making music is rock bands. Cole Porter would be screwed in the present environment, but you wouldn't even notice.

Posted at July 15, 2007 7:15 PM in response to Miscellaneous

While I'm definitely on the pro-evolution side on this issue, I must say I'm nonetheless troubled at the political naivete, even snobbery, of this discussion.  The superiority of evolutionary theory is demonstrated here by its respectability among scientists, and the inferiority of intelligent design is demonstrated by its disreputability among scientists.  Neither argument is going to be terribly persuasive to an electorate that doesn't like to be told to shut up and listen to the experts.  Publication in peer-reviewed journals will impress deans; it's hardly likely to impress an ordinary parent.  And as for imposing the teaching of intelligent design on teachers--the constituents of the public schools are under the impression that teachers work for them, and aren't getting paid for doing what they please in the classroom.  Under our political system, teachers are supposed to be accountable to parents and voters, not to a scientific establishment.  Their speech in the classroom isn't "free"; after all, if they freely choose to lead their students in public prayer, the ACLU will (rightly) come down hard, because they're speaking as agents of the state.  

Thus the problem here is to convince the public of the superiority of evolutionary claims, and the fundamental obstacle is one that commentators have pointed to since Tocqueville's day: that democracies are intrinsically suspicious of claims to vested authority [That's true of Religious Right claims as well, BTW].  Until science, and its defenders, come up with a better defense of evolutionary theory than its ability to jump through what to the public is a set of meaningless institutional hoops, it's going to continue to run into Dover-like problems.

Posted at October 13, 2005 8:27 AM in response to Unintelligent Design

Actually, defenses of the big businessmen of the Gilded Age are old hat among business historians; when I was an undergraduate in the 1960s a standard essay topic would ask if they were "Robber Barons or Industrial Statesmen?"  Matthew Josephson's book The Robber Barons--the book under criticism above--was published in the 1930s, and there's been a bit of historiographical water over the dam since then.  Most historians nowadays would not swallow Josephson whole by any means; the Carngeies and Rockfellers were builders, not just robbers.  But the story we've tried to tell has been, shall we say, a bit more nuanced than the above passage.  Sigh--We're used to being ignored, and having the chattering classes fight the battles we tired of eons ago.  But I do find it amusing that a bright kid could go through Harvard and never be aware of a central controversy in American history.

Posted at October 12, 2005 5:11 PM in response to Gilded Age: Cool Again

Note, though, that all these examples weren't simply indicted, they were convicted.  Until it's clear that DeLay can't beat this rap, celebration is a tad premature.

Posted at September 29, 2005 11:19 AM in response to What Happens to Indicted Congressmen?

 "Any other large sales of HCA in same time frame?- Any other family member selling in same time frame?"

Insider trading is a matter of public record; you can see for yourself on Yahoo! Finance.  Just go to HCA and click on "Insider Transactions"; you'll get two year's worth of 'em.  In short, there was heavy insider selling early this year, especially in the second quarter, although actually not much by other members of the Frist family (Sen. Frist's brother Tom is the only official "insider" listed).  Researchers monitor insider trading closely--which (whatever my own dislike for my Senator) leads me to counsel caution about jumping to conclusions.  HCA stock had seen a big runup, and insiders were cashing in on options like crazy.  Any reasonably savvy investor, or a good advisor to an unsavvy one, could have spotted the trend without any inside info--insiders dumping a stock that might have gotten overpriced anyway.  That still leaves questions about the seeing-eye blind trust, and Frist's contradictory statement about its "blindness," but so far Frist seems to me to be mainly guilty of opportunism.

Posted at September 26, 2005 2:00 PM in response to "Pump and Dump" Politics

"At the same time, it's hard to resist the temptation to slap someone who's both very much in thrall to a misguided cultural agenda, but who can't even manage to live up to her own ideals (to wit: getting knocked up, getting divorced) in her personal life."

Try resisting it.  Has it ever crossed your mind that her concern with "values" might stem from a recognition of her own vulnerability?  The Bright Young Things of the blogosphere love to sneer at the correlation between social conservatism and high rates of social dysfunction in rural/Red State America, presuming that it shows rural/Red State folk to be hypocrites.  Maybe; more likely their conservatism is in part a product of their sense of life as precarious--a sense, as far as I can tell, altogether absent in your own privileged existence.  Your cultural liberalism is, far more than I think you yet appreciate, a product of privilege.

Posted at August 14, 2005 2:10 PM in response to What's The Matter With Iceland?

"You used the Great Depression as an example of a Realigning Event that led to a Realignment in 1932.  But was that outcome truly reflective of a watershed change in partisan attachments, or was it more relective of the skilled campaigning of FDR, who first promised a "New Deal" in his convention acceptence speech?"

Actually, the realignment in this case began before 1932, in 1930; in the House of Representatives, Democrats went from 106 seats down to virtual parity before wiping the floor with the Republicans in 1932.  Similarly, 1894 brought a huge Republican surge in the House; the party actually lost seats in 1896, but its lead was so enormous by then that it scarcely mattered.  Moreover, the era of roughly equal partisan balance preceding the 1890s  began with 1874, not 1876.  Clearly we continue to assign way too much importance to presidents and presidential candidates--chiefly because presidential campaigns make for such dramatic setpieces.  The deeper structures of American politics are more important than presidents [although a realignment can get derailed by bad luck or incompetence; prior to 1894 Democratic success with immigrants seemed to be giving them an increasing edge].

Note, BTW, that all three realigning years I cite above [1874, 1894, 1930] followed immediately upon major economic collapses [1873, 1893, 1929].  Such catastrophes aren't fully necessary [1994 saw only a mild downturn, and the greatest realignment ever occurred in the posperous 1850s].  But in those cases the old alignments were under enormous internal pressure, and it didn't take much for them to give way.  It's hard at this point for me to see a major constituency [like white southerners in 1994] ready to switch loyalties from Republican to Democrat.  In the meantime, Democrats will hang close, but those seemingly marginal gains look terrifically tough to garner.

Posted at August 11, 2005 8:52 PM in response to Political Science 101

"I don't have much use for the other DLC folks who like to tear down other Democrats in public."

Scroll down--every time Ed posts, the comment thread gets loaded down with "folks who like to tear down other Democrats in public"--but they're anti-DLCers.  Moreover, when they post, they don't address the issues Ed raises--they just call him names.  Really tiresome.

Posted at August 11, 2005 2:25 PM in response to A Bit of Southern Comfort

Actually, I think the stronger case can be made that 1994 was the "realigning" election, because tensions that had long been building up along the tectonic plates of American politics suddenly got released, sending a surge of votes into the Republican camp.  This was notably, but not exclusively, the case among white southerners who suddenly decided to start voting for real Republicans instead of fake Democrats.  Compared to that election, though, no election since 1994 has been of much consequence in terms of partisan alignment; 1996 and 1998 cleaned out the most egregious nut cases from 1994, but since then, on the congressional level, hardly anything has changed much.  Partly this is due to redistricting [although I think Alan Abramowitz of Emory makes a good case that redistricting as a cause of congressional stability is overrated], but it's mainly due to the fact that we're into a period much like we saw from the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s: a roughly even partisan balance, strong partisan polarization underwritten by a sort of tribalism in which people vote their "identity" and respond to cultural issues, etc.  Such a system can be quite stable, and partisan control can shift back and forth [though note that we Democrats have been within striking distance for the better part of a decade without actually being able to strike].  But it can hardly compare with with the "one-and-a-half-party system" that got ushered in in the mid-1890s.

Posted at August 11, 2005 12:09 PM in response to Mike, I Disagree

Posted at July 26, 2005 5:40 PM in response to populisms left and right